Let's start with meaningful words: “If people talk, time is running out. When time speaks, people leave. In relation to the author of this quotation, its meaning is enriched with new meanings. When Jean Baudrillard left, it turned out that he had said so much about the time and the society in which he lived that his personality and work acquired a timeless significance.
He was a man who looked for new ways in everything he did - in philology, in sociology, in philosophy, in literature and even in the art of photography.
Peasant's grandson
He was born in the north of France, in the city of Reims, on July 27, 1929. The ancestors of his family always worked on the land, only his parents became employees. For education, an elementary or secondary school is enough - this was considered in the Baudrillard family. Jean was able to enter the Sorbonne, where he studied German studies. He later said that he was the first in his family to receive a university education, and this caused a break with his parents and with the environment where he spent his childhood. A solid, stocky man with the round face of a peasant who lovedsmoke homemade cigarettes, entered a small caste of influential French intellectuals.
Jean Baudrillard, whose biography has long been associated with the teaching of the German language and literature, has been working in a secondary school since 1956. At the same time, he collaborates with many publications of the "left" wing, publishing literary and critical essays in them. In these articles, as in the translations of Peter Weiss and Bertolt Brecht, the figurative, ironic, paradoxical style of presentation that distinguished even the most complex scientific texts of Baudrillard is polished.
Sociology teacher
In 1966, he defended his thesis in sociology at the University of Nanterre-la-Defense. The university campuses on the outskirts of Paris in the late 1960s were a hotbed of "leftist" ideas, a seething cauldron from which the 1968 student uprisings erupted. Radical "leftist" ideas had little attraction for Baudrillard's independent nature, although he recalled that he participated in anti-war protests that turned into a strike - in events that almost overturned the de Gaulle government. Perhaps it was then that one of Baudrillard's most famous sayings was born: “The loudest demand is silence …”
At the University of Paris-X Nanterre, and since 1986 Paris-Dauphine IX - two of the thirteen that made up the Sorbonne, J. Baudrillard served as senior lecturer (associate professor), and then professor of sociology. At that time, many prominent scientists worked there: Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu. After the publication of the first serious works, Baudrillard becameto enjoy great prestige among the creators of the philosophy of the new time.
Neo-Marxist
Jean Baudrillard was fond of Marxism, and even translated some of the works of the founders of scientific communism - Marx and Engels. But this influence was of a paradoxical nature, which manifested itself in his study of other philosophical theories. Penetration into the essence of ideas was followed by their application to the analysis of modernity, and ended up with attempts at complete reform or harsh criticism. As one of his aphorisms says, “New thoughts are like love: they wear out.”
The System of Things (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970) are works in which Jean Baudrillard used certain provisions of communist theory to address contemporary sociological problems.
The mythical "abundant society", which was considered the goal of the romance of the industrial revolution, has turned into a civilization where the main goal is to meet the accepted standards that form the advertising of services and goods. The ideal she created is continuous consumption. The Marxist view of relations of production as the main criterion for evaluating society in the modern world of signs and symbols is hopelessly outdated.
Neonihilist
Hard criticism of the current state of society is gradually becoming the dominant feature of Baudrillard's publications. The work "In the Shadow of the Silent Majority, or the End of the Social" (1983) contains the assertion that the modern era is approaching the threshold beyond which decay and collapse. The former class structure of society has disappeared, giving rise to a void between individual humanmasses, which also lose their real shape.
Human community becomes a fiction. Jean Baudrillard, whose quotations are unique in their accuracy and expressiveness, writes: "Citizens are polled so often that they have lost all opinion." It denies the masses the capacity for constructive political representation. All ideologies - religious, political or philosophical - are non-life because they are deprived of specificity by generalization from the side of a law that does not distinguish them and by having a ready collection of labels with which they are endowed.
Postmodernist
The polemical properties of Baudrillard's critical texts aroused a violent reaction of protest among some, and gave others a reason to declare him the high priest of postmodernism, which he also actively opposed. Despite the high concentration of rejection of ongoing social processes, which saturates his works with Baudrillard, the philosophy of postmodernism seems to him reeking of despondency, and even regression.
The essence of postmodernity, which consists in the generation of new artificial systems through an endless game with images and concepts from various fields, does not seem to him progressive and creative. But it was very difficult for him to disown the titles of the “guru of postmodernism” type. The virtuosity with which he expressed his ideas in words was too obvious, the game of images and meanings in his texts was too bewitching, and irony and black humor from Baudrillard became almost a separate meme.
Ideologist"The Matrix"
One of Baudrillard's most famous theories is concentrated in the book Simulacra and Simulation (1981). It lies in the concept of "hyperreality", in the fact that we live in a world where simulated feelings and experiences have replaced the real thing. The carriers of this hyperreality, the "bricks" of which it consists, are simulacra. Their meaning is in reference to a thing or concept, which means that they themselves are just a simulation. Everything is modeled: the material world and emotions. We know nothing about the real world, we judge everything from someone else's point of view, we look through someone else's lens.
The relevance of this idea for the Russian reader is fixed by Pelevin in "Generation P", and for the whole world - in the cult film trilogy of the Wachowski brothers "The Matrix" (1999). The reference to Baudrillard in the film is shown directly - in the form of the book "Simulacra and Simulation", from which the main character - the hacker Neo - made a hiding place for illegal things, i.e. the book itself became a simulation of the book.
Jean Baudrillard was reluctant to talk about his involvement in this trilogy, claiming that his ideas in it are incomprehensible and perverted.
Traveler
In the 1970s, a scientist travels the world a lot. In addition to Western Europe, he visited Japan and Latin America. The result of his visit to the United States was the book "America" (1986). This philosophical and artistic essay is not a tourist guide, not a tourist report. The book provides a vivid analysis of the "original version of modernity", in comparison with which Europe is hopelessly behind in the ability to change, in the creation of a utopian and eccentrichyperreality.
He was struck by the product of this hyperreality - the superficiality of American culture, which, however, he does not condemn, but simply states. Baudrillard's arguments about the results of the Cold War are interesting. With the US victory, the reality of this world becomes even more illusory.
The trip to Japan turned out to be significant for Baudrillard in that he became the owner of a modern apparatus there, after which his passion for photography reached a new level.
Photographer
As he did not consider himself a philosopher, he did not call himself a photographer, and the popularity he gained in this capacity arose without his desire. It is clear that Baudrillard, as a photographer, remained as independent and original a thinker as a philosopher or writer. His way of looking at things is unique. He said that his task was to achieve objectivity in the reflection of the object and its environment, in which nature itself would show what it wanted to make visible.
His photographic works, published in several albums, Baudrillard's approach to photography were the subject of serious discussions among professionals. His posthumous exhibition "Disappearing Methods" of 50 photographs enjoyed great interest in many countries.
Genius aphorism
Few people were able to express a thought in such a way that its depth and sharpness would be preserved even after translation. Some aphorisms are a continuation of reasoning on scientific and philosophical topics, others have purely literary merits, similar to the brilliance of an advertisingslogan:
- "Dry water - just add water".
- "The pleasure of feeling water on the lips is greater than that of swallowing it."
- "Statistics are as much a form of wish fulfillment as dreams are."
- "I only have two faults: a bad memory and… something else…"
- "The weak always give way to the strong, and only the strongest give way to all."
- "The saddest thing about AI is that it lacks cunning and therefore intelligence."
- "God exists, but I don't believe in him."
- "I feel like a witness to my absence."
"Death is meaningless" - Jean Baudrillard also liked to repeat these words. The biography, briefly reflected in two dates (1929-27-07 - 2007-06-03), included, among other things, a cosmic amount of intellectual work, which makes it easy to believe in the truth of this statement.
